THE WORKING POOR.doc

Rigby 1 The Cultural Archive: Split Labor Markets, the Working Poor, the Media and Discourses Concerning Immigration By David Rigby Rigby 2 Acknowledgment I would like to express my gratitude to the following important folks for a long year of patience and solid advice. Thank you to Mary Brown, Ben Feinberg, Siti Kusujiarti, Laura Vance, and Cameron Lash for talking me down off the ledge when my ambition and ego got bigger than the available time and resources could support. Ihope that the final result was worth your trouble. I learned a lot. Rigby 3 Abstract This research utilizes content analysis and semi-structured interviews in an attempt to examine potential connections between the framing of stories concerning immigration in print media and the expression of negative prejudice by domestic peting ina split labor market with Latin American immigrants. Tracking leading economic indicators such as unemployment rates and the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index and making use of group-threat theory, Frame Analysis, and Stuart Hall's linguistic model of representation, I look at possible correlations between framing of immigration articles in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune and public perceptions of immigration as the current economic crisis was ing apparent. The results indicate that there isno statistically significant correlation between economic growth and discussion of immigration in terms petition for jobs and social services consistent with group-threat in print media. My results do show that as economic growth is increasingly negative, the number of articles concerning immigration that appear in the newspapers studied drops significantly. There is also evidence ofa “ cultural archive ”of stereotypes regarding Latin American immigrants that domestic laborers in Western North Carolina utilize to attach meaning to and interpret their experiences with the local immigrant population. Introduction Given the convergence of several factors — an eco